Let me tell you a story about towels. Towels are awesome and useful. They are one of the few items that you use every single day of your life, if you wash yourself that is. And they are also one of the things I am a complete nut about. Allow me to begin my tale of towels by showing you a picture of my previous two generations of bath towels and my new towels which just arrived today.
The striped towel on top is a representative of the bath towels I had throughout all of high school. I got them to take to summer camp the year between middle school and high school. Their last real use was on my trip to Israel between high school and college. Nowadays we use those towels on the floor of the bathroom and not to dry our bodies. The two blue towels on the left are what I have used since freshman year of college. The three towels on the right are the brand new towels which arrived today.
Now, the first thing you need to know is that every solid colored towel pictured here is technically not a bath towel. They are technically classified as bath sheets. You might go into your local towel shoppe and see really ultra-big bath towels on sale for a decent price. And no doubt, they will be bigger than the default bath towels. But none of them come close to the size of the bath sheet. Bath sheet is the secret codeword for “towel that is actually large enough to dry an adult human being”. Here is a picture so you can see what I mean.
The striped one is a standard sized bath towel. It is what most people dry themselves with after a shower or bath. I’m no fatty, in fact I’m anti-obesity, but that towel is too fucking small for an adult human. I need at least two of them to dry myself adequately.
So? Buy awesome bath sheets, problem solved. Not so. The average price for a bath sheet ranges from $20 to $40 depending on quality, color and actual size. Many bath sheets are plenty long, but lack width. Make sure you’re getting something at least 34″ wide. The two blue ones were found by my mother. She got them at BJ’s on sale for a crazy low price. She was never able to find them at BJ’s again, and she regrets not buying more of them. Most stores don’t carry bath sheets at all. When you are lucky enough find them in a store the color selection is limited and the price is high.
Now you’re wondering where I got my new three awesome towels, aren’t you? You know I’m not the kind of person stupid enough to pay $120 for three towels. Three towels are not worth the same as four Nintendo DS games by any stretch of the imagination. Well, if you were paying attention to my del.icio.us links you would have noticed my link to domestications. My mom actually clued me into this site. They have bath sheets in a wide variety of colors for $8.88 each! Unbelievable. I immediately ordered three and my roommate ordered two.
If you are frustrated with the size and quality of your current bath towels I suggest you upgrade to some bath sheets. That way you can fully dry your body with just one large piece of cloth. If you are at least an averaged size adult human being I don’t see how you can not have towels of proper size. Have fun drying yourself everybody.
Uh… is this a Hitchhiker’s Guide reference?
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value—you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you—daft as a brush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag [non-hitch hiker] discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have ‘lost’. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.” (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter Three)
See the Wikipedia article on Towels.
Well, yes and no. I am dead serious about all the things I said pertaining to bath sheets and their awesomeness and expensiveness. It’s just sort of obligatory to give a nod to the HHG whenever speaking of towels. You might notice I linked to the Wikipedia article on towels in my post. Perhaps I need to tweak the style a little to make links more obvious.
edit: Yeah! Making all the links bold is awesome!
You state that towels are necessary, and while I enjoy my bath sheets, I know a few people who air dry (it is better for your skin according to many dermatologists).
In addition to my bath sheets I also have several high quality bath robes, including one that really is the cadillac of robes (made by the same company who outfits all the expensive hotel suites and luxury resorts), and let me tell you they are great- particularly on cold days or when you don’t want to get dressed right away. I highly recommend a nice, plush terry cloth or terry velvet robe.